Dev Watch

Visual Studio 2017: What Features Didn't Make It, What Are Planned

With the long-awaited Visual Studio 2017 finally rolling out this week, here's a look at some user-requested features that didn't make into Microsoft's flagship IDE, and some that are on track for future releases.

Microsoft uses its User Voice site to solicit ideas and feature requests from developers, and faithfully addresses each, marking them as Completed, Under Review, Declined, Planned and so on.

Under the Declined category, the most-requested features for Visual Studio (not specific to VS 2017) are dominated by diehard Visual Basic users. They just won't let go.

In response, in an extensive note published almost three years ago, Microsoft said that despite VB6 being "awesome": "It is not a viable option to create a next version of VB6. We stand by our decision to make VB.NET and the .NET Framework."

Despite Microsoft's well-reasoned response, developers are still commenting on the post, with many posts being published just this week (my favorite is one from today: "Why are you here? Is this a punishment? How long do you have to do that?").

VB coders are nothing if not loyal and persistent, though. Microsoft also stamped DECLINED on:

CodeLens ("Find references and changes to your code, linked bugs, work items, code reviews, and unit tests") was the subject of a seemingly disproportionate number of declined requests, but the top vote-getter looks like a request for "Silverlight 6." That request received 15,574 votes and 685 comments. But -- guess what? -- just like VB6, it ain't happening.

Items that will be happening are listed in the Planned and Started categories.

Note that some of the Started items may have been in addressed in the brand-new VS 2017, but Microsoft might not have gotten around to marking them as Completed yet.

Speaking of Completed, some popular items in that category include many oldies but goodies and some brand-new closed-out items:

Visual Studio for Mac Os x

Support .NET Builds without requiring Visual Studio on the server

Make the installation of Visual Studio light-weight and fast

Make all msdn documentation available off-line

Multithreaded C/C++ linker

Fix 260 character file name length limitation

Add support for Git over ssh in Team Explorer

Use proper mouse wheel routing

Run unit tests in parallel

While there's no official Visual Studio roadmap available from Microsoft so developers can get a better handle on what's planned for the IDE, you can check out the comments section of a blog post published this week by John Montgomery outlining what's new in VS 2017 to find tidbits about future plans.

There, Microsoft execs such as Mads Torgersen, Rich Lander and Miguel de Icaza answer questions about WebAssembly support and C# 7.1, and there's other discussion about profiler support for .NET Core, WPF, Windows Forms and more.